Tall Black Boots
Prefer to listen?
The first full semester I taught Composition, I found a stock photo of some boots and thought I would try an experiment on descriptive writing. I didn’t really know how it would go, or even what exactly I would say, but I put a picture on the screen for the class to see and asked them what they saw, the exchange went like this:
"Um, just boots”
“What kind of boots?”
“Black Boots”
“What kind of black boots?”
“Tall Black Boots”
I smiled and said, “What kind of tall black boots?”
They looked at me like I was a hopeless mess who just didn’t understand. I wasn’t trying to trick them, but they sure seemed to think I was. So, I asked them follow-up questions, like “how tall” and “compared to what” and “how high up the leg”. They started to answer with a flurry of responses. I picked the very first response of “upper-calf height black boots.”
“now… what kind of black”
“Black is black,” they responded
“Where else would you see this kind of black? What does it feel like or remind you of?”
I waited for the end of the awkward thirty to forty seconds, and someone got brave enough to answer. From the second row, an unassuming young woman answered:
“Tall soft black leather Harley riding boots with a dull and scratched square silver buckle. The kind of boots that look and feel like they have spent the last ten years on a road somewhere.”
It was one of my favorite moments as a teacher. I roared out loud (they must have thought I was crazy). It was never just black. Suddenly they smelled like old leather too. I asked the students if they could see the boots now, then I asked them to write their own description of their own shoes. No one wrote that they were just white shoes (or any color). We learned together how the world and the words changed when we really noticed it.
I realized, and I hope they did too, that it was never really about the boots or even the color black. It was about the difference between naming something and noticing it. Most beginning writers reach for the nearest word and stop. It was a boot. It was black. Done. But somewhere around the second or third round of questions, the words would change shape. The description wasn’t better because the vocabulary improved. It was better because they finally paid attention long enough to see them.
I used to think writing was mostly about words, finding the right one, in the right order. That changed that day. I think writing is mostly about attention, and the experiment was just the record of where that attention went. The words come after. The looking comes first. This is now the first principle I teach every single semester.
What I didn't understand at the time was that the exercise had nothing to do with boots or any object I happened to grab off a desk. It was practice for a habit I think we all need to learn. We move fast, quickly label it, and move on. Looking more than once costs time, it takes effort, it is sort of deliberate and not always intuitive.
Looking twice is rarely efficient and carefully paying attention is slower still. But some of the most important things I've learned in my life arrived only after I stayed with something just a bit longer than seemed necessary.
I believe we must pay attention first, and write (or act) second. Often, relationships, institutions, and grant proposals don’t fail because of bad sentences or poor choices. It is more likely that they fail because nobody looked closely enough, at the actual community, the actual data, the actual need, before they started writing. Strong proposals, strong systems, and yes, strong essays read like someone paid attention first and wrote second.
I still catch myself doing the opposite in my own writing sometimes, reaching for the first word that's close enough, moving on before I've actually paid attention. It's the easier habit. Naming something is fast and noticing takes longer.
I've never once regretted the extra look and the extra attention. Not with grant proposals, large-scale institutional systems, or my own pair of black boots. Most things become interesting if you're willing to look at them longer than is strictly necessary.
Writing just records what the attention finds.
Love Emily